Now to turn with me to Genesis. Now Sarai, Abram's wife, had borne him no children. She had a female Egyptian servant whose name was Hagar. And Sarai said to Abram, behold now, the Lord has prevented me from bearing children. Go into my servant. It may be that I shall obtain children by her. Abram had lived 10 years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram's wife, took Hagar, the Egyptian, her servant, and gave her to Abram, her husband, as a wife. And he went in to Hagar, and she conceived. And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked content on her mistress. And Sarai said to Abram, may the wrong done May the Lord judge between you and me. But Abram said to Sarai, behold, your servant is in your power. Do to her as you please. And Sarai dealt arson with her, and she fled from her. The angel of the Lord found her by a spring of water in the wilderness, a spring on the way to shore. And he said, Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going? She said, I am fleeing from my mistress, Sarai. The angel of the Lord said to her, return to your mistress and submit to her. The angel of the Lord also said to her, I will surely multiply your offspring so that they cannot be numbered for multitude. of a man, his hand against everyone, and everyone's hand against him. And he shall dwell over against all his kinsmen. So she called the name of the Lord, who spoke to her, you, O God, are seeing. For she said, truly, here, I have seen him who looks after me. Therefore, the well was called, near the high roar, that lies between Kadesh and Bereth. And Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram called the name of his son whom Hagar bore, Ishmael. Abram was 86 years old when Hagar bore Ishmael to Abram. Let us pray. Father in heaven, we pray that, Lord, you might grant the servant utterance and grant all other servants, understanding, may we have insight into the greatness and the mercy and the greatness of our God. We pray in Jesus' name. I know that you're thinking, as we read this narrative here, will Abram ever learn? After all, haven't we just read how it was that Abram, thinking, God has made me a promise that I'm going to be the father of many. Now, I'll just bet I would have to remain alive in order for that to happen. And so, I am in danger of being killed by this king in Egypt. Therefore, I'm going to come up with this scheme. I'm going to tell Well, I guess there is some question as to whether, technically, Abram was lying or not. There are a number of difficulties as we looked at this passage together, one being simply that the Lord never takes any action against Abram. He takes the action against the king of Egypt instead. backfired didn't work. It was not what saved him. It was the Lord's intervention that saved him. And you would think that Abram would have gotten the point. God is able to keep his promises. He doesn't need my help. You think that he might have learned that, our first point. What happens when we try to do God's work, man's away. But here he is again, and it's been 10 years, so it's been a long time. They've been in the land, and they've seen that, well, the children are coming. We know that offspring are necessary to the fulfillment of this promise. No offspring yet after 10 years. Sarah is still barren. And so once again, we have something that evidence, historical evidence shows was a tradition that was perfectly legal in that time and in that society, that a woman could take one of her servants and give her to her husband. Again, we have to be careful about being sidetracked into thinking, now this is the kind of thing and one woman. They are not two. The wandering off is one. to learn, and once we learn that one man and one woman are supposed to remain faithful to each other whether they have children or not, then we're all done. We've learned the lesson. Once again, we have the Lord not entering into the account and showing Abram the error of his ways. once again doubt that God is going to carry out his promise, that he's going to do as Go into my servant. It may be that I shall obtain children by her. And Abram listened to the voice of Sarah. For this was after they had lived in the land of Canaan for 10 years. And this, so Hagar conceived. Went into Hagar, she conceived. And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt. said to Abraham, may the wrong done to me be on you. Now, everybody remembers, well, a lot of people. I used to be able to say this, but I have to remember. I've been around for a few decades. But a lot of you remember growing up on the King James Version. And somehow, everything that is put in King James English sounds holy. people in the Bible did, lo, they barely did unto f and so forth. And it just sounds really sanctimonious, because these are Bible people. But you read it in an up-to-date version that is written in the kind of English we speak today, and you go, these people were knuckleheads. They were just crazy. What was wrong with them? This is just a rocker room, where You have Abram saying, all right, OK, fine. I'll go along with the scheme. And then, of course, the woman, Hagar, becomes pregnant. And she, being just a towering genius, looks with contempt on her mistress. So that's going to work out well. And then Sarai, of course, blames Abram. May the wrong done to me be on you. And this is just a confused mess. Abram, who obviously has had sort of a habit of trying to keep Sarah happy, he does what she says, then it doesn't turn out so well, then he says a hands-off kind of thing. Look, you do what you want to. This is just a family mess. That's what it is, by a bunch of bad decisions These, once again, are ordinary people with ordinary sins. That is the kind of person God chose as the great father of the faithful, someone just like they were made. In many cases, someone less wise than many that he has not chosen. In some cases, even less moral. Abram was not chosen because God found something that was morally worthy in him or that he was somehow naturally a great character. There were things that were brought in Abram by God's grace that made him a great man. But that was a result. of God's choice, not the reason for God's choice. I was still sinking in with Abram. He was still learning that lesson. He was thinking, perhaps God needs some help. And this is the kind of thing that happens when we try to do God's work in man's way. When we assume that the natural course of nature. Some of the topology that the course of nature is necessary. We have got to know the means by which God is going to accomplish something. If we can't see those means, we don't see how he could possibly accomplish his end. As we recall, last Sunday evening, we talked about the connection that is placed in Romans chapter 8 between the end and the means. God doesn't simply make things pop out of nowhere. God uses means in order to accomplish his ends. They're connected. The things that God foreordains are intelligent, and they are the result of intelligent planning on his part. It makes sense. When we are speaking about matters of faith, we're not talking about things that are anti-rational. But we are very often talking about things that are beyond our understanding. Just because they're beyond our understanding doesn't mean they're irrational. We don't know everything. We're not even capable of knowing everything. There is all kinds of propositional truth that we don't even have the ability to grasp. It's beyond us. And so we have to live in a world where we worship a God who is smarter than we are. And when he tells us that he is going to do something, he will do it. We can trust in him. We can depend upon him. And perhaps, if we trust him, we do things his way. He will show us. He will open our eyes. And he will enable us to see, this is the way I am doing it. And lo and behold, we are soon going to see and going to be reviewing again how it is that God so wonderfully works and how he miraculously enables Sarai to conceive. And indeed, it does happen. As you look back upon it, it looks like it was done in the ordinary way, as a father and mother had children. Another thing that sort of causes us to wonder about whether the main lesson here is that You are not to bear children in this way. You're not to have servants taking the place of wives and having children. You think of how, later on, the family of Jacob, the family of Israel, is built up. And that half of the tribes of Israel are fathered by And so we know God works bad things together. Even the sins of his children, he works together to accomplish his good ends. They are not a good excuse for us disobeying him, but nevertheless, he is able to overrule. And that is exactly what he does here. that we still seem to have failed to learn the lesson that God will accomplish what he has promised. And our task is to trust him and obey him, not to look at the plan and see the disconnect between the plan and what we observe will come to know the Lord. And we see the present situation where the church seems to be very much beleaguered, very much just shunted off to the side by the world. We're in kind of the backwater of culture today. We are not the influencers of culture. We're not the ones who are the movers and shakers making things happen. the church, particularly the evangelical Bible-believing church. How are we ever going to achieve the nation's all-knowing reward and the knowledge of God covering the earth if we remain just imitant and no one's listening to us? Well, there are those who say, you know what is working out there? There's not just the means of communication, but the content of the communication. People tend to listen better if you let them tell you what they need and what they want. And here's what we do. Then we see, well, you know what? The Bible and Jesus will give you some of the things that you want. And you can have your best life now. You want to have wealth. You want to have influence. You want to feel that you are significant and important. The Bible has a lot to say about that. And God thinks that you are a very significant person and that he wants you to have all the things that you want. So if we can tell people that, perhaps we can gain more influence. It even comes into, you may have heard of the church growth Some of these things may have been adjusted somewhat since I first read Donald McNevin's Understanding Church Growth, which was a seminal book about this. But he actually recommended the best way to get churches to grow faster is to go with the grain. And what he meant by that was you don't try to combine a lot of different flock together. And so you want people to be pretty much the same socioeconomic level. Then your churches will grow the same ethnic makeup, and your churches will grow faster. So here you have the growth principles that are in direct contradiction to the command of God. As again and again and again, he shows that he means for all the nations to come together into one holy nation, his people. And they will be from every tribe and tongue and nation. all the peoples that have scattered throughout the world, that he might make one holy nation out of all of them. And here, man's way of doing God's work in direct contradiction to God's way. So we still rented apart and everything just wound up in alienation as Sarah deals harshly with Hagar and Hagar flees. But then the leader intervenes. Just as the Lord intervened when Abram scotched everything before, so he does it again. It is the angel of the Lord. Every time the angel of the Lord, not an angel, not some angel, but whatever he is referred to as the angel of the Lord, every single time he appears, it is very clearly deity. Whether this is a pre-incarnate appearance of the Son of God, The angel of the Lord accepts worship. The angel of the Lord accepts the sacrifice that was given by Samson's parents. The angel of the Lord actually goes up in the flame of the sacrifice, accepting it for himself. servant, the angel of the Lord, God himself, the great God and creator of all things, the sustainer of all things, the author of redemption, has a one-to-one interview with Hagar. An Egyptian, Hagar is an outlier. Hagar is not one of the chosen people of God. Or is she? The angel of the Lord comes to her and he says, Hagar, servant of Sarai, knows exactly who she is, Are you gone? I am fleeing from my mistress, Sarah. The angel of the Lord said to her, return to your mistress and submit to her. The angel of the Lord also said to her, I will surely multiply your offspring so that they cannot be numbered for multitude. So then, happened to them, and she then answers him. So she called the name of the Lord and spoke to her, you are a God of seeing. God indeed had seen her, and she had seen the Lord. Now, to behold the Lord, to encounter the Lord himself, That would seem to be the privilege reserved for the highest, for the most select. And here we have the Lord appearing to her just as he appeared to Abraham. We are being shown in this encounter something that is later on to be clearly articulated in words. Here we have an event. We have an encounter that fits in with God's purpose that he so clearly expounds later on. There is a wideness in his mercy. When God chooses Abram, he does not choose him because he's better than anyone else. He chooses him in order to make him better. The same with anyone, anyone from any place. And God is going to make it clear that his mercy is going to be shown to all of the nations. It's going to be done through have been, coming in a way that should never have been, and what does God do? He shows his mercy. He shows his kindness. He shows his forgiveness. He shows that my mercy and my grace are so abundant that it will take in even that Ishmael will be a wild donkey of a man, his hand against everyone, and everyone's hand against him, and he shall dwell over against all his kinsmen." We, of course, recognize that the descendants of Ishmael would be the Arab nations. And it is still a characteristic, it has been a characteristic get along with anybody else, they can't get along with each other. They seem to be particularly contentious. And here we have this prophecy saying that's what they're going to be like. Now, is this the point at which we say, ah, well, you see, that's the difference between God's chosen But if you look back on the record of the children of Israel and the children of Isaac, what do you find? The same thing. You find the same kind of fighting, the same kind of inability to get along with each other, the same kind of sin and alienation from each other, that without the grace of God, Natural descendants through Isaac are no different. What makes the difference is the covenant grace of God. I'll just say this one word about what is going to happen in chapter 17. Not only is God making it clear to Hagar that he will be God to her. He has revealed himself to her as well. And if she will return and worship him as the one true God, yes, the God of Abram, and she will enter into the covenant. And when he says, go and return to your mistress and submit to her, he is saying to her, return to the household of Abram and worship me, the one true God, along with the household of Abram. And you will be one of my covenant people, just as Abram is. And your son will be one of my covenant people as well. That's demonstrated in the next chapter when Ishmael is circumcised. He receives the sign of the covenant. They did not remain faithful to their covenant God. But God was faithful to them, and he genuinely offered them a place in his family. That is what he is doing here with Agar, just as much a member of the family as sons and daughters. God overlooked and forgave those and reached out to this woman. And that is the way that he reaches out to us all. We are Hagar. We have as little claim upon God's grace and upon calling ourselves God's people as Hagar did. But God called her to himself. God showed his grace to her. that I will be your God and you will be my people. I see you and you will see me. We will know one another. Those components are there in the angel of the Lord's revelation of himself to Hagar, to his command to Hagar to return to the family, return to the covenant family. the one and only God. He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He has made one covenant of grace with them. The construction that is held by many who believe in Islam, that there are two ways to the same God There is one covenant, not two. There is one covenant. There is one covenant people. And what God has shown us here is that even those children of Ishmael can come and be reconciled to the one true God in his way, according to his provision, according to his can be baptized and come into the family of God. Indeed, this is the glorious promise. There are a number of places, but I read one of them in Isaiah chapter 60. As the rams of Nebaioth shall minister to you, tells us in Isaiah 60, By this time, of course, it had become a place name, but it was named after one of the sons of Ishmael. And so we have explicitly here a reference to how it is that the Arabians, and it's fulfilled again in Acts chapter 2, there were Arabians there. Even those who in many ways are, declared themselves to be the sworn enemies of the Jews. made members together in the same family, because the angel of the Lord would be born of a virgin, who would live and suffer and die for the sins of those of every tribe and tongue and nation and would fulfill Justify them all. Therefore, bring them all into the family of God. Praise the Lord. Let's pray. Our Father in heaven, we thank you for such a glorious gospel. We thank you for the way in which, in so many very personal and touching ways, it is demonstrated, even in this encounter. We know, Lord, that just as you knew Adar by name, you know each